Version 2.3.0

New Features

  • A self created certificate authority (CA) certificate used to sign the wildcard cluster ingress certificate can now be supplied when deploying Educates. This will be injected into workshop sessions, docker side car and other components as necessary, so the cluster ingress certificate can be trusted when workshops need to contact services via any exposed ingresses Educates creates using the wildcard cluster ingress certificate. This CA will also be automatically injected into cluster nodes when using the educates CLI to deploy a local kind cluster with Educates. Injection of the CA into the nodes of an arbitrary Kubernetes cluster can be enabled if desired, however the nodes of the Kubernetes cluster must use a Debian based operating system and use containerd as the container runtime. For more details see Defining configuration for ingress.

  • A separate TLS certficate can now be supplied corresponding to a hostname supplied as override when creating a training portal. This is to handle the case where the desired hostname for the training portal doesn’t match the wildcard cluster ingress certificate. Do note though that the hostname for the training portal must still share a common parent domain with the wildcard cluster ingress certificate due to restrictions on cross domain cookies. For more details see Overriding the portal hostname.

  • Multiple web user interface themes for Educates can now be supplied via secrets created in the Kubernetes cluster. Which theme is used can then be selected when deploying a training portal, thus allowing different training portals on the same Kubernetes cluster, and the workshops created from them, to have different styling for the web user interfaces. Themes created in this way can include additional assets such as images, which the CSS or Javascript can reference when changing the visual appearance of the web user interface. For more details see Overriding styling of the workshop and Selecting the user interface theme.

  • In the training portal definition, as a global setting, or against specific workshops, it is now possible to supply a startup timeout. If this timeout value is exceeded when requesting a workshop session via the training portal web interface, the workshop session will be automatically deleted and the workshop user redirected back to the training portal web interface, or front end portal, as appropriate. Note that when using the educates CLI to deploy workshops, it will set a default startup timeout of 2 minutes for any workshop session. For more details for Timeout for accessing workshops.

  • Added httpie to the workshop base image as alternative to using curl in workshop instructions or workshop setup scripts.

  • Added the sqlite package to the training portal image such that the Django dbshell management command can be used within the training portal container to access the database used by the training portal.

Features Changed

  • Previously the OAuth based authentication workflow for workshop sessions required TLS certificates to be signed by an official certificate authority and self signed certificates were not supported. A self signed wildcard cluster ingress certificate can now be used as workshop sessions will contact the training portal API to authorize the session using the internal cluster service, rather than the public URL and as such it doesn’t need to be able to trust the certificate.

  • When a dialog is displayed indicating that a workshop session has expired, when it is being terminated explicitly, when errors occur doing workshop setup, or when a special dialog is displayed on starting a workshop, the background behind the dialog will now be filled in and hide the workshop dashboard behind. The workshop dashboard behind will become visible when the dialog is dismissed.

  • When the files download mechanism is enabled for a workshop session, access was previously only possible from the web browser as access was controlled by the cookie based authentication. In addition to this, it is now possible to download files from the workshop session outside of the browser session, by supplying the workshop session services password via the token query string parameter of the URL for the file to be downloaded. For more details see Enabling workshop downloads.

Bugs Fixed

  • When using the educates CLI to deploy the training platform and the local secrets cache contained multiple secrets, the secret corresponding to the cluster ingress domain may not be matched and used correctly.